EU sets Union-Wide switch off date.

Zhane

from Digitalspy.co.uk
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/article/ds26889.html


The European Union has set a union-wide target date of 2012 for digital switchover.

Calling the decision "an important development," Alun Michael, the UK's minister for industry and the regions, said that "most EU countries will try to complete the transition from analogue to digital television broadcasting by 2012."

The UK currently holds the EU presidency and plans to begin switchover in 2008, finishing in 2012.



Ireland is bound to miss this date surely? They've only just started a trial or something.

Skyuser

RTE will give a few years notice and say " a sure don't most of you lot have that old satellite on the house, we'll let you keep paying sky"

Ulsterman 1690

Are the powers that be in Ireland capable of doing anything without Brussels making them ?

byte

Despite not having any DTT yet, there's no reason that we can't have nationwide DTT coverage by 2012. Trials for a few years until 2007, national rollout over a few years until 2010, and 2 years to tell everyone to upgrade, bringing us to 2012!

Of course, it's easy in theory! But as our country is a lot smaller than UK and a lot less people, it should be possible to hit the 2012 target.

Just need RTE and Govt powers to get their fingers out and stop messing around.

Skyuser

people need more than 2 yrs 2 get used of the idea. Britain gets 8 yrs

Mossy Monk

if someone is constantly told to upgrade or lose your terrestrial television over the space of 2 years they will soon get the message

JohnC.

Skyuser wrote:

people need more than 2 yrs 2 get used of the idea.

Why? People get Sky Digital or NTL/Chorus installed and seem to be able to get used to it practically overnight. Why would getting a DTT box be any different? We only had a few (6?) weeks to get used to a whole new currency and the country didn't fall apart. Any time something changes, the red herring argument that people will take a long time to get used to it comes up. But it never seems to happen.

I don't really see what there is here for people to get used to. All it is is a different transmission method. The end result is the same TV channels on the TV. It doesn't make a real difference to the user what transmission method is being used to get Fair City on the box, as long as they get their Fair City.

byte

Mossy Monk wrote:

if someone is constantly told to upgrade or lose your terrestrial television over the space of 2 years they will soon get the message

Exactly. 2 years is plenty of time for a coutry whose population is under 4 million to get the message!

If it carries the main 4/5 UK terrestrials, in clear digital, I can't see too many whining (unless the UK channels come with an additional fee, like digital TV license or something).

DMC

In contrast, regions in the UK with over 7 million are been given 2 years to chew it over.

watty

Its doubious that Terrestrial Digital makes any sense.

Dishes are much smaller and can get smaller still than envisaged.

DTT needs many more transmitters that was originally thought.

Satellite TV TX cost is about 1/100th of what was envisaged.

Analog Satellite used 25 to 30MHz per transponder.

Analog TV uses less than 8Mhz per channel.

The bandwidth saving is not so impressive (4 times worse).

HDTV is on horizon before the supposed Switch off date. Terrestrial can't support more HDTV than 4 to 8 if nothing else transmitted!

Too many channels means poorer quality than Analog!

DVB-h makes more sense along side the existing four analog channels.

Did you know that the signalling on line 23 of annalog is for true animorphic WS? Analog supports true 4:3 / 16:9 anaimorphic WS switching and transmission.

PAL PLUS supports letterbox on 4:3 TVS and near animorphic quality on a 16:9 WS tv.

lawhec

Just to take you up on some points Watty...

Dishes are much smaller and can get smaller still than envisaged.

Dishes smaller than 45cm are unlikely to appear because to do so the beamwidth of the focal point. For even smaller dishes to appear high-powered satellites will need to be further spaced apart.

DTT needs many more transmitters that was originally thought.

On what basis is this on? It's being suggested that in the UK a full powered DTT network that matches analogue coverage would require LESS transmitter sites than for analogue TV somewhere in the region of 200-500 for DTT compared to over 1100 for analogue. The reason for this is that many relay stations are set up because of problems with ghosting makes reception from main stations impossible to watch yet reception from the same site on DTT is perfectly grand.

Satellite TV TX cost is about 1/100th of what was envisaged.

I don't doubt that Satellite TV has some cost savings but 1/100th sounds too good to be true. Sky were keen on switching off their analogue service as soon as their digital service started to save on dual-illumanation costs, alongside other broadcasters like UKTV. However lower transmission costs for Digital broadcasting via satellite were well known even over 10 years ago. This is what appealed to broadcasters. However the end result has been that arguably it has became too cheap(!) with 28 east now plauged with over a dozen "Babestation" programmes at night, over 40 teleshopping channels and numerous gaming / quiz channels. Ofcoms EPG rules means that these cannot be easily deleted of the Sky EPG by the home user

Analog Satellite used 25 to 30MHz per transponder.

Analog TV uses less than 8Mhz per channel.

The bandwidth saving is not so impressive (4 times worse).

That makes no sense. The digial equivalents use the same amount of bandwidth and in both cases around 5-8 video streams can fit in to the same bandwidth occupied by the same analogue channel (more if you're will to sacrifice some quality.)

HDTV is on horizon before the supposed Switch off date. Terrestrial can't support more HDTV than 4 to 8 if nothing else transmitted!

The push for HDTV (at least in the UK) is going to be made next year. It's already conceded that for the time being HDTV will be confined in general to satellite broadcasts, alongside cable if the infrastructure and bandwidth is there. The BBC are however looking to use an unused UHF frequency in London for Terrestial tests and are also looking at a system of "HDTV streaming" over DTT where it will stream a HDTV show to a PVR overnight before the main broadcast during downtime.

It's not too critical at the moment that terrestial has HDTV here at least - the average picture tube sizes are 21 inch for 4:3 and 28-32 inches for 16:9, which means that the difference 720p or 1080i has over 576i is going to be marginal for those screen sizes until you start hitting bigger screen sizes like 42 inch 16:9 where there is a noticable improvement. Also the type of person that is going out there to buy a 42 inch widescreen LCD HDTV compatible display is likely to be loaded enough to pay for the inital premiums of HDTV that Sky are looking for as opposed to DTT boxes in the UK that are now retailing for as low as £27 (€40).

If the Irish Republic was to use the six DTT allocations that it has at its main transmitters and quite a few of its "relays" soley for HDTV, the use of MPEG4 (which the French are using for Pay-TV at SDTV on DTT) on a 64QAM FEC 2/3 8K multiplex should be enough to fit in three HDTV channels at good quality. 3 x 6 = 18 streams, more than enough for Ireland.

Indeed the Republic has enough frequencies available to be able to do something like keeping four multiplexes for SDTV MPEG2 and two for HDTV MPEG4 if it wanted to, not to mention "released" analogue frequencies including some RTÉ have never used.

Too many channels means poorer quality than Analog!

Arguement applies to any platform, be it terrestial, satellite or cable. Both on terrestial and satellite larger broadcasters are broadcasting at resolutions lower than that of D1 DVD (720x576) - all ITV channels on Astra 2D use 544x576 resolution, MTV are also using a similar resolution (this is just above SVCD). Similar resolutions are being used by some channels on DTT in the UK on Muxs 2 & A. However for the "VHS" generation the difference is not noticable to most people, especially if you didn't tell them about it.

bk

All technical arguments aside, Freeview DTT has been a massive success in the UK. Freeview numbers have already passed digital cable and are expected to pass Sky next year.

Sure, it might only be able to carry 30 channels at the moment, but 30 quality channels for the cost of just two months of Sky is more then enough for the majority of people, which is why Freview has been such a success.

You also forget that many people live in apartments and therefore can't use Sky.

If you ask me, in the long term, cable could actually surpass Sky as the platform for premium TV content (VoD and BoD over IPTV).

Round Cable

bk wrote:

All technical arguments aside, Freeview DTT has been a massive success in the UK. Freeview numbers have already passed digital cable and are expected to pass Sky next year.

Most recent figures say, Freeview is outselling Sky 4:1 It is a massive sucesss, and DTT here would be even bigger here considering there are no FTV cards for satellite.

watty

Only because it is free to the user. Which is not the model proposed here. The pay TV version failed for various reasons.

Who pays for the Irish DTT?

bk

watty wrote:

Only because it is free to the user. Which is not the model proposed here. The pay TV version failed for various reasons.

Actually there is no proposed model here yet, it still hasn't been decided.

The Pay version failed because the broadcasters (BBC, ITV and C4) decided that they could make more money from advertising by stealing viewers from Sky, then trying to charge for it.

watty wrote:

Who pays for the Irish DTT?

The license payer, same as in the UK. It really isn't anymore expensive then running the analogue terrestial network.

BTW Round Cable, I expect DTT in Ireland to be far less successfull then Freeview, unless it has a good line up of free quality UK channels.